Some say that by the time they found the man, there were 200 in the angry mob, but an Oberlin man who remembers vividly what happened 70 years ago says there were 60 to 80 men who finally caught up with Richard Read, 53, at the Cheyenne County Jail. Newspaper accounts say twice that many were waiting near McDonald.

The mob included men from Hoxie, Selden, Rexford and Oberlin, said Elmer Zodrow, who grew up on a farm near Selden. Some were on horseback, he said, while others were in cars with the license plates removed. Zodrow says he still probably could remember some of the names of men who were involved -- but like most everyone else who knew, he won't say.

The mob took Read from the jail in St. Francis and committed the last lynching in Kansas on April 18, 1932. Read's lynching was the first reported in Kansas since 1920, when Albert Evans was hanged in Mulberry after he was identified as the attacker of a 15-year-old girl. Nineteen lynchings have been recorded in Kansas history, almost as many as the two dozen men the state hanged.

The case was national news, featured on the front page of papers from coast to coast. The Denver Post, which ran columns of stories and photos, said "Judge Rope" had done a good job. The Chicago Tribune featured a banner headline in three-inch type across the top of page 1.

Zodrow, who lives in Oberlin, was 7 at the time. He recalled that reports at the time said 8-year-old Dorothy Hunter was lured into a Model A Ford driven by Read one day after school in Selden when she returned to school alone to retrieve a forgotten lunch pail.

Read's signed confession, printed in The Denver Post, said he went "back thru Selden, and a small girl about 8 years old was in the middle of the road in front of me and waved at me and asked if I was going to take her riding. I told her I would, and she got in the car in the front seat with me, and I cannot remember where we went that night, as I had been drinking."

After Dorothy's disappearance, her father, Floyd Hunter, notified the Thomas County sheriff, but she wasn't found that day. Zodrow said until Dorothy was found and an arrest made, things were a little tense. People made sure that their children got to school and home each day.

Read reportedly told authorities he attacked the victim, struck her over the head and strangled her before burying her body in a haystack southeast of Atwood.

Some newspaper articles at the time said Read turned himself in. Others said officers arrested him at the home near Rexford where he lived with his parents. A narrative by William McGinley, the son of Thomas County Sheriff Ed McGinley, who arrested Read, said he turned himself in. At first, he told officers he and the girl had been kidnapped, but after questioning he reportedly confessed.

People in Selden and the surrounding area went to the sheriff's office in Colby, asking the sheriff to turn Read over to them, but McGinley said Read was the only one who knew where the body was and asked them to go home. There were conflicting stories about how the body was found the next day.

The Saint Francis Herald reported that authorities had hoped to keep the prisoner's whereabouts secret because they feared mob violence from the start. Read was moved to the jail in Cheyenne County for protection after it was learned he was being held in Colby. That evening, the Rawlins County sheriff called Cheyenne County Sheriff A.A. Bacon to warn him that a mob was looking for Read and heading toward his jail.

The newspaper said Bacon and his deputy decided to take Read out of jail into the country and hide him until the mob left, then return him to the cell, but they were too late. They went for gasoline, and when they got back, the mob was already at the courthouse. The men detained the sheriff and searched him for his keys, then opened the courthouse.

The jail on the fourth floor was open, but the cell had a combination lock on it, the paper said. The mob commanded the sheriff to open the lock.

"When he resisted, he was poked in the back with a couple of cold and hard instruments, which he states were revolvers, and after studying the proposition over he decided that under the circumstances there was nothing to do but to comply with their orders," the story said.

Read was placed in a car as County Attorney Fred Rueb arrived to plead with the crowd to let the law take its course. In no mood to listen, the mob took the sheriff, deputy and county attorney with them, although they later were set free near McDonald.

Zodrow said that on their way east, the mob stopped, tied Read with barbwire and dragged him up and down Main Street in Atwood. The sheriff and others found his body later about three miles east of McDonald.

Those who knew about the lynching wouldn't talk about it, preventing state authorities from ever punishing the hangmen. Even today, Zodrow won't talk about who was in the mob, though most of them are long gone. He says some of them were neighbors and he didn't want to cause any problems for their families.